- 19 hours ago
Category
🎥
Short filmTranscript
00:00There's a bit of tension in the story for this video.
00:03When I put out a call for interesting things that I could film in England,
00:06one of the team from Jodrell Bank got in touch.
00:09Tucked away in the Cheshire countryside, it's the home of the Lovell Telescope,
00:13a World Heritage site, the largest radio telescope in the country,
00:16and one of the scientific and engineering icons of Britain.
00:19And the tension is this, they wanted to show off the new science
00:23they're working on all across their campus.
00:25And we are going to do that, because one of the big questions I had was,
00:28is a 70-year-old telescope still useful?
00:31But also, from my side, what I wanted very much was to climb the giant telescope.
00:40Well, there are definitely worse views than that to start the day, aren't there?
00:44There is a reason for that, beyond my just being a massive nerd.
00:47When I was young, probably about ten years old, I went to Jodrell Bank as a visitor
00:50to see what was then called the Discovery Centre.
00:53Not on a school trip, young me, very much into space and science,
00:56wanted to go see the big telescope.
00:58But of course, they don't let visitors onto or even up close to the telescope,
01:02it's a working science thing.
01:04And while I had a good day out, I think I was a bit disappointed
01:08that I couldn't get under it or... up on it.
01:11There's no photos of that trip, by the way, it was the 90s.
01:13People didn't carry cameras around every minute of their lives.
01:16Anyway, about thirty years later, I went back.
01:19Adult me, parked up, checked in with the team at Jodrell Bank,
01:21and first up, they took me to see the newly updated Visitor Centre.
01:25There's a lot of screens and displays, it's far more impressive than it used to be,
01:28but I was quite glad to see there were still a couple of things I remembered.
01:32Do you still have the black hole table?
01:34Because I remember...
01:36You still have the black hole table!
01:39I spent like 15 minutes as a kid just playing with that black hole table,
01:43I was really tempted to do that again, but never mind.
01:46Also, the old acoustic dishes are still there.
01:49What you're about to hear is the audio from the on-camera mics, by the way, no trickery.
01:53I have such a strong memory of these from when I was like ten years old.
01:58You can whisper very quietly, and it turns up on the other side.
02:02Core memory.
02:03Got to do that again thirty years later, it's not bad.
02:06I couldn't find the mock control room where kids used to be able to sit down
02:09and pretend they were controlling the dish, but still,
02:11happy with that, nostalgia complete, on to the science.
02:14Now, there are two sides behind the scenes at Jodrell Bank these days.
02:17I did remember seeing the old university buildings from the 60s and 70s,
02:21but in the last few years, there's been a very shiny new headquarters
02:24built next door for another project.
02:26The Square Kilometre Array Observatory, the SKAO,
02:30is a big intergovernmental organization.
02:33The actual telescopes are on the other side of the planet,
02:35in South Africa and Australia, but the headquarters is at Jodrell Bank.
02:39I met William, who's their director of communication, outreach and education,
02:43and the first thing we went to seemed almost out of place.
02:46That's a very sci-fi sign, isn't it?
02:48You've picked a full science fiction font there.
02:51Okay, you have a proper council chamber.
02:54Wow, so that's right there in the middle of Cheshire.
02:57That's quite unusual.
02:58Yeah.
02:58It's an unusual setting.
02:59Big picture.
03:00What is the SKAO?
03:02So maybe you should turn around and this is the SKAO here, you know.
03:07Well, all these flags.
03:09Oh, I can see why you're ahead of outreach.
03:10That was smooth.
03:12But this really embodies who we are as an international organization.
03:16What we are doing is really to build and to operate the world's largest radio telescopes.
03:21And one will be observing lower frequencies, so that's the one in Australia.
03:26That's the one we will be using to really go back in time to what we call the cosmic dawn.
03:31The cosmic dawn, as in D-A-W-N, is the period just after the Big Bang.
03:36And by just after, I mean a quarter of a billion years,
03:40because the numbers you encounter in astronomy are mind-boggling.
03:43So really observing, you know, these very first signals which were emitted after the Big Bang.
03:49And so that really, that will give us some clues about, you know, how all of it started.
03:54We know that, you know, Nobel Prize discoveries will be made with our telescopes.
04:00When? I don't know.
04:01But, you know, that's the goal.
04:03I got to talk to their head of science operations.
04:06But one of the cool things about the SKA is really that we're building it to be as flexible as
04:11possible,
04:12to observe things that we don't even know about yet.
04:14We don't know what our galaxy really looks like.
04:16I mean, it's quite bizarre to think about the fact that, you know...
04:19We do not know that.
04:20With all of the beautiful images of other galaxies out there,
04:23we don't really know what our own galaxy looks like, because it's quite hard to observe.
04:27Yeah, we don't have a mirror out there.
04:28Exactly. We don't actually know how big stars form.
04:31And when you're talking about understanding galaxies throughout the universe,
04:36I mean, if you don't understand how those building blocks are really being formed,
04:40then how can you really know the detail of what's going on in the galaxies?
04:44I mean, how planets form.
04:46Yeah.
04:46I mean, we know that they form in the debris disks around stars.
04:50But we actually don't know the crucial phase of how things get from really, really small particles
04:56through the centimetre scale up to something that's much larger, of course, to make a planet.
05:01We just assume it happens, and it must happen.
05:04Yes.
05:05We just don't know how.
05:06We know it happens, but our theory currently doesn't support it,
05:10and the SKA is really well suited to that scale.
05:14A lot of things that I assumed were pretty much proven and sorted
05:17are still promising theories with data attached.
05:20The SKAO is going to produce about a petabyte of science data every day
05:24to help with a lot of astronomy.
05:26But while that's all coordinated at Jodrell Bank,
05:28the actual receipt of signals is happening in other countries.
05:31Because one of the problems with any radio telescope in the UK is
05:34there isn't much room for radio quiet zones,
05:37and certainly not this close to cities.
05:39Jodrell Bank does ask visitors to turn their phones off,
05:42but there are still roads and train lines nearby.
05:44There will be interference.
05:46So I still have the question.
05:48Is the Lovell telescope, the famous one, still useful?
05:52Or is it now more history than science?
05:54To start answering that, I got taken into the telescope control room by Simon.
05:59He's a professor and the associate director of the observatory.
06:02Five years to build.
06:03Very rapid project, enormously ambitious in the early 1950s,
06:08not long after the war, to build a radio telescope,
06:12which was so much larger than anything that existed before.
06:16How much?
06:18So it was ten times larger than the largest telescope that existed before.
06:21Oh, okay, right, sure.
06:24And the leap in the dark.
06:25They had no idea what they would discover.
06:28There were big telescopes before what became known as
06:31the Mark 1 250-foot telescope.
06:33They just weren't steerable.
06:35To this day, the Big Dish at Jodrell Bank is still the third largest
06:39fully steerable telescope in the world.
06:41It can be pointed at anywhere in the sky.
06:43I cannot tell you how much the young version of me that sat at the mock control room
06:49that the Discovery Centre had back then is absolutely overjoyed.
06:56Oh my word.
07:00So that is the telescope.
07:01That's the 250-foot 76-metre Lovell telescope.
07:05Pointing straight up because we're doing some painting and repair work on it at the moment.
07:10I keep worrying that I'm getting in the way of science here.
07:12I just realised that this is not an observing day.
07:15There is literally a cherry picker with someone painting the telescope in there.
07:18All right, so, can I have a look? What's it?
07:21So this is, Merz is our controller today.
07:24So there's somebody in there, there's a controller in this room 24 hours a day.
07:27Right.
07:28It's a lovely control desk, this.
07:30I know that's the nerdiest thing I've said in a while.
07:32It's a really nice control desk.
07:33So this is the original 1957 control desk in terms of the steel,
07:39but all the electronics that drives the telescope and controls the telescope so precisely is new.
07:45I am a little worried that because the folks in that room were explaining the
07:48very basics of their radio astronomy work to me,
07:51I'm doing them a little bit of a disservice.
07:53So just to be clear, everyone you're hearing from in that control room has a PhD.
07:58Anyway, Merz, the telescope controller,
08:00also showed me a more modern-looking bank of screens at the back of the room
08:03that connects the telescope to the eMerlin network,
08:06a collection of smaller dishes across the UK.
08:09So you can remote control all of those as well?
08:11I'll remote the control from this station here.
08:13As you can see, we have the names of all the telescopes.
08:17You'll see they're pointing at the same position, so they're all in the same source.
08:22That's not an icon, that's not a static icon.
08:24That's literally a direction that's pointing.
08:26That's live, that's a live thing to come through.
08:29You'll see Lovell is...
08:31Lovell is pointed up and it's red.
08:32Pointed straight up and it's red, it's pointing up.
08:34But look, in a few hours sign, hopefully...
08:36Right.
08:37So you're observing something right now.
08:40I'm not sure what it is, but you're definitely observing something.
08:43That something was explained to me by Emmanuel.
08:46Again, PhD.
08:47We are pointing on this particular target,
08:503C-D-4, which is one of the brightest radio sources in the sky.
08:53And we use this source as a calibrator to calibrate that instrument
08:57or the observation when it's done.
08:59So once it stays on this target for some time in the sky,
09:03all the telescopes will move to the science target,
09:06from the calibrator to the target and then on itself.
09:09And then once the data comes through the fiber optics
09:11from all the network of telescopes, it is correlated right here in general bank.
09:15And someone's going to earn their PhD off that,
09:17or someone's going to find some magical discovery.
09:21We...
09:21You never know.
09:22You never know.
09:22One of the advantages of radio astronomy is that scientists can take signals
09:26from telescopes that are a long way apart,
09:28correlate them all together with fiber optic cables and computers,
09:31and end up with the equivalent resolution of a telescope
09:34the size of that entire network.
09:36This is the ends of those optical fibers.
09:40So these optical fibers stretch out to the individual telescopes,
09:43and then we have to focus them.
09:45And we do that in the machine which is behind us.
09:47Oh, that's a...
09:49It's...
09:50It's...
09:50Ha ha ha!
09:51Okay, you've got...
09:53Oh!
09:54Okay.
09:55Yeah.
09:58A little bit noisy.
10:00So this is the supercomputer which is doing the photosync.
10:04It's a correlator designed to multiply the raw signals from each pair of telescopes,
10:10accumulate those, and then Emmanuel and colleagues turn those into images.
10:14And the reason it's in this rather weird room is that this keeps any of the radio signals that this
10:20generates away from the big dish.
10:22But now we can go see some of our young scientists working on the data.
10:26The young scientists in question all either have their PhDs or are working on them.
10:31Sorry to interrupt, I'm...
10:32Here's Tom.
10:33I've been told you've all been, like, briefed on who I am and what I'm doing here.
10:37I just, I'm worried that Simon just kind of opened the door and said,
10:39Hi, here's Tom.
10:40Benjamin is working on a live feed from the 42-foot telescope,
10:44one of the other smaller dishes at Jodrell Bank,
10:46which is picking up the signal from the rapidly rotating remnants of a collapsed star,
10:51called a pulsar.
10:52I have an animation of what one of those looks like here.
10:55Oh, someone has prepared a presentation here.
10:57Simon's been doing hard work here. Thank you, folks.
11:00So what we're seeing here is a beam of radio emission,
11:03a little bit like a lighthouse, that is sweeping itself around the sky.
11:08And the reason it sweeps around the sky like this is I actually have a little model here.
11:12You have a model!
11:16I knew you were coming.
11:17As the star rotates, that beam, that radio beam,
11:21like here that's coming away from the magnetic pole,
11:24is sweeping around the sky somewhat like a lighthouse.
11:26And if we happen to be fortuitously located in the galaxy,
11:30and that beam sweeps across Earth, we will see a little pulse every time it does so,
11:35and so we call them pulsars.
11:37A pulsar is the size of a city, the mass of the sun,
11:41and the fastest one we know of rotates 716 times per second.
11:47Like I said, astronomy includes mind-boggling numbers.
11:50The idea really is to unambiguously account for every single rotation of these stars.
11:55Right.
11:56Because if we can do that, then we can do all kinds of experiments,
11:59because what we have is effectively clocks in the sky.
12:02And if you have clocks in the sky, that's a fantastic way to test general relativity,
12:07to find the limits of Einstein's theory.
12:10Next up is Phoebe, who was bouncing radio signals off asteroids.
12:14So there's a radar in Madrid that they'll be transmitting,
12:18and then all the radio telescopes in this network will then be listening to the echo
12:22of that radar pulse, like bouncing off the asteroid.
12:26Wow. And you do that a few times, and you can work out how fast it's moving,
12:29what direction it's going, everything like that?
12:32Hopefully with just one observation, with the multiple telescopes at the same time,
12:36you should get an idea of speed from that as well.
12:38Resolution is much better than optical.
12:41We can get down to about a metre, sort of with the imaging that we're going to do.
12:47Hopefully. This is sort of quite new, and we've not tried it before.
12:51This is the first VLBI observation to get this level of detail.
12:58VLBI, there is Very Long Baseline Interferometry,
13:02which is the name for that process of combining multiple telescopes in different locations.
13:06I mean, do I just ask what everyone's working on?
13:08Like, I'm assuming Simon has prepared all of you with something, but...
13:11Uh, no, this is my regular office.
13:14OK. Thank you.
13:17That was a little unfair to Justin, who I later found out specializes in
13:20researching cosmic rays and high-energy particles, and was actively working there.
13:24I'm sorry, Justin.
13:24But all this research is based on data coming in from other dishes.
13:29We still haven't talked about the Lovell Telescope itself.
13:32My question remains, can a 70-year-old telescope still be useful?
13:36Or is it just a heritage landmark now?
13:39Because it has a huge amount of heritage.
13:41Perhaps most famously, it intercepted photos that were transmitted
13:44from the first Soviet lander on the Moon.
13:47Those pictures were in the British press
13:48well before the Soviets ever wanted them released.
13:51The Western world had their first word of the successful probe from an English source,
13:56the Jodrell Bank Observatory near Manchester.
13:58It was now time to head out to the telescope itself,
14:01while the maintenance teams were also out there and I wasn't disrupting science.
14:04I put on a climbing harness...
14:06Yeah, all right.
14:07And then went out the dish, accompanied by Simon, plus telescope supervisor Phil,
14:12who's worked on the site for decades, and also hastily recruited and quite excited
14:16Megan, one of Jodrell Bank's comms team who was very happy to volunteer to hold another camera.
14:22Lead the way, thank you very much.
14:23Oh, shades. Definitely gonna need them.
14:26I've never encountered safety sunglasses before, but when you've got not only the sky,
14:30but also the sky reflected off the bowl of a bright white telescope, they're a good idea.
14:35It's still impressive.
14:36It really is.
14:383,000 tons, you know, able to move from one part of the sky to another fairly quickly,
14:43but also able to track things across the sky to within a thousandth of a degree.
14:49And that's a challenge now. It was a challenge in 1957, before computers.
14:55I came here as a kid and remember looking up at this when I was about this tall and wanting
15:02to do this.
15:03Where do we go from here?
15:04We'll head up towards the lift.
15:05All right.
15:07We just take care of stepping over the rails.
15:10You can still be quite oil and greasy.
15:11Oh, okay.
15:12And we don't want greasy boots to go climbing with.
15:15Oh, yeah.
15:16So are these railway tracks?
15:18Yep, standard railway tracks.
15:20Huh.
15:21That makes sense because it was built, what, 70 years ago?
15:25And you use the technology you have if it works and it's proven.
15:27That's about 50 to 100 tons per wheel is the load.
15:32There's 64 wheels it runs on.
15:36So…
15:36And you change the wheels.
15:38You jack the telescope up.
15:39Yeah.
15:40So it's…
15:40Really?
15:41Yeah.
15:43Just a hydraulic jack.
15:45Wow.
15:46About 200 tons to lift it up.
15:48Slide it out and put another one in.
15:50The telescope is named after Sir Bernard Lovell, first director of the observatory,
15:54the driving force behind building the telescope.
15:56And the painting job is apparently never-ending.
15:59You can see the blue cherry picker in the background there.
16:01But it's a steel structure.
16:02It relies on painting to protect it.
16:06And we want, you know, it's been operating for nearly 70 years
16:10and we want to keep it going for another 70 years.
16:12Bit cosy, but you just take four people.
16:16As we headed out onto the catwalks, I was a little bit lost for words.
16:23Oh, wow.
16:30You OK?
16:30Yeah.
16:32We didn't check that you were OK with heights before coming up here, did we?
16:36Megan was absolutely fine with heights.
16:39Also, you can see two of the other smaller Jodrell Bank dishes there.
16:42Those were the ones actively listening and doing science at that moment.
16:45From there, it was up onto the first surface of the dish.
16:48The telescope doesn't look a bit different compared to the early days.
16:51It's been shored up and upgraded over years,
16:53and it gained a brand new surface in the early 2000s.
16:56Oh!
16:57The first stop was between those two surfaces,
16:59and then it was up onto the dish.
17:06Thank you!
17:07The telescope's been standing for 70 years.
17:10Yeah.
17:11This floor has been standing for 25 years, and it's made of steel.
17:14And yet, somehow I'm still a little bit worried as I go up here.
17:19So the idea of the parabola is to focus the radio waves that land on the telescope
17:23to the focus, which is what you can see at the top.
17:26Because there's all sorts of bad graphics where the beam is coming into that directly.
17:31Yeah.
17:31And it's not.
17:31It comes into this bowl and gets bounced up to there.
17:36Yeah.
17:37And the property of parabola is wherever it hits the surface,
17:40it ends up in that hole in the middle.
17:42And moreover, the path length from each ray is the same.
17:46So if you like, all those radio waves add up coherently.
17:51In step at the focus.
17:52Oh!
17:52That is the property of a parabola.
17:54Right.
17:55Radio has a wavelength anywhere from a few centimetres to kilometres.
17:59So thankfully the dish surface doesn't have to be too precise.
18:01We're not going to cause any damage walking on it.
18:03To see nothing but dish and then sky is magic.
18:08Okay, if you're ready for the next challenge,
18:09we can have a go at heading up to the top.
18:12Yeah, this is where I'll leave you two behind.
18:16Let's do it.
18:21And the sun's come out, and it's blinding.
18:24You were right about those shades.
18:26I'm going to put those on.
18:27I know I look like a dork.
18:28Oh my word!
18:30You can't see my eyes, I take the shades off again in a bit.
18:33But with the sun out and that light being reflected up towards us, it was bright.
18:37There is a reason that you do not point a telescope at the sun,
18:41even well off axis like it was, it felt so bright.
18:44But we were high enough that I could see the horizon again.
18:48I am so incredibly lucky.
18:50Right, where do I go from here?
18:52Climbing harness hooked in, up the ladder to the focal point.
18:56That is the very top of the telescope.
19:05Oh, it wobbles.
19:07Of course it does.
19:09What an incredible view.
19:12Something special, isn't it tough here?
19:14It really is.
19:17So, is it still doing science?
19:20I don't know what I was expecting.
19:22Some mirror system, some fancy little thing.
19:24No, you're literally moving the entire detector.
19:27Because there's only one focal point to the whole dish.
19:31So, to use that same focal point twice, it requires to move one out of the way.
19:39Yeah.
19:39And put the other one into the same slot.
19:42The telescope is 70 years old.
19:44It's now a grade one listed historical site,
19:46which is probably going to give them all sorts of trouble refitting it in the future.
19:49But the surface is only 25 years old, and those multiple detectors,
19:54the different science packages that can be moved into the focal point,
19:57are much more recent than that.
19:59The Lovell telescope is still doing world-class science on its own,
20:03as part of networks, because it turns out that as long as you do the upkeep,
20:06the scientific concept of massive parabolic dish that you can point anywhere
20:12doesn't really go out of date.
20:14But there is one more thing.
20:16I spent a while admiring the view, and then headed back down,
20:19and back in the control room, I got to do something that my ten-year-old self,
20:23playing at the controls in the mock control room at the Discovery Centre,
20:26would never have dreamed was possible.
20:29All right, five seconds on the siren.
20:32Five seconds on the siren, do it.
20:43That got their attention, right. And then?
20:45Return is entering.
20:47Enter on here.
20:48Yeah.
20:51With slow grace, the Lovell telescope began to turn,
20:54and pointed at its first science target for the day.
20:59There's a kid on the fence there.
21:02It's going to be like a few pixels in the final footage.
21:05And he's just staring up at the machine.
21:08And he's about the age I would have been when I got here.
21:13I wonder if the same thing's just sparked off in his head.
21:21The ten-year-old version of me is so happy.
21:24Your dreams don't trip.
21:27Next time, I visit a school where the students have four legs and a bendy backbone,
21:32to see how they outperform robots.
Comments